Popeye was right: eat your greens to keep muscles strong

Just as Popeye said, eat your greens if you want to keep yourself strong. Eating leafy green vegetables every day is good for your muscles and will help reduce your chances of a fall as you get older.

It’s the nitrates in vegetables such as spinach, lettuce and kale that are doing all the good work; eating the equivalent of just one cup a day is enough to keep up muscle strength and function.

Eating your greens every day for 12 years will boost lower limb strength by 11 percent, and your walking speed will increase by 4 percent, say researchers from the Edith Cowan University who tracked the health of 3,759 people.

These benefits could be achieved without exercising; just eating your greens every day could be enough, although the ideal would be to combine the diet with muscle-strengthening exercises including weight training.

The diet becomes even more important as we get older. Having strong legs will help reduce the risk of falls and fractures and our overall health and wellbeing will also improve, and it’s especially good for our heart.

But it’s all an uphill battle. As with the rest of the world, fewer than one in 10 Australians are eating their five to six daily servings of vegetables.

(Source: Journal of Nutrition, 2021; doi: 10.1093/jn/nxaa415)

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